Peter Maniscalco, activist who helped shutter Shoreham nuclear plant, dies at 77

Peter Maniscalco, a free-spirited protest leader who camped for months with a lantern to protest the controversial $6 billion Shoreham nuclear plant that he eventually helped shutter, has died. He was 77.

The Manorville resident died Monday at East End Hospice in Westhampton Beach, surrounded by family, after battling aggressive prostate cancer for 17 years.

Maniscalco was a persistent and vocal opponent of the plant through the 1980s and '90s  in a way that friends recalled bordered on the spiritual.

“He was almost like a shaman,” said Gregory Blass, who was the Suffolk Legislature’s presiding officer at the height of the Shoreham battle in the late 1980s. “He was the calmest voice in the Shoreham saga, a truly good soul, whose impact was to lift everyone up."

“He was the heart, soul and conscience of the movement,” said Michael Dawidziak, another plant opponent and veteran political consultant. “His lasting legacy is that he cared about the land, air and water that we live on, breathe and drink. He considered them sacred.”

Maniscalco was among the 571 demonstrators arrested at the June 3, 1979, protest that drew 15,000 to the Shoreham site in the wake of the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. 

Later, Maniscalco camped out for nine months on Route 25A across the road from the Shoreham property with a lantern that burned 24 hours a day in a vigil with others to alert the public about how the plant, which used Long Island Sound water as a coolant, would damage marine life.

“He made the decision to put the Sound above his own physical comfort to save the Sound from what less thoughtful people were doing,” said his wife, Stephanie Joyce, who met  him while helping to organize the vigil. A decade later, Maniscalco held a shorter vigil to block plans for an offshore  liquefied natural gas line in the Sound, which was never built.

A throwback to the 1960s, Maniscalco turned to his earth-based spirituality after dropping out of a career as a city planner in the Midwest and came to Long Island to learn clamming, an occupation he acknowledged he did not do that well. Friends say he also worked over the years in a variety of jobs, including truck driver, adjunct professor at Southampton College and several other local colleges, and consultant on holistic health and wind power.

Even after Shoreham, Maniscalco carried an environmental torch. When aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo tried to keep leading energy critic Irving Like, 90, from speaking at a hearing to overhaul the Long Island Power Authority after superstorm Sandy, Maniscalco stood up to stir the crowd. George Hoffman, a longtime friend, recalled warning him by text not to be thrown out.

“He replied, ‘Trust me, I’m a professional. I know how to do this,' " Hoffman laughed.

In addition to his wife, Maniscalco is survived by his daughter, Gina Guccione of Farmingville; his son, Keith Maniscalco of Rocky Point; a stepson, Andras Brem of Huntington Beach, California; a stepdaughter, Orit Miller of Falmouth, Kentucky; and six grandchildren.  Another son, Peter Maniscalco, predeceased him.

Plans for a funeral had yet to be finalized.